One of the recent trends seen in small business is the continuing increase and broadening of technology uses; not surprising given the myriad tablets, smart phones, and other devices being introduced. New technology and technology features are announced daily and small business is taking full advantage of the expanding technology options.

The co-founders of TranscribeMe had a well-defined need and utilized a number of technologies to create a new business model that satisfied their requirements to bring that solution to the marketplace.

Co-founder, Alexei Dunayev, said that it was his wife’s and his co-founder’s wife’s need for quick and accurate transcription services that gave rise to TranscribeMe. Their wives are a Ph.D. researcher and an attorney. Dunayev, a technologist-cum-software engineer, received his MBA at Stanford and understood what was needed to create a “successful global technology campaign,” saying he combined all of his passions in TranscribeMe, according to Small Business Trends’ Brent Leary.

Both co-founders’ wives were generating what Dunayev described as an “insane amount of audio recordings” and realized that the end product, while high quality, was very time-consuming to achieve. The duo collaborated a variety of technologies—including offering iPhone and Android apps that customers use to make recordings that are stored in the cloud and utilizing voice recognition software—and the use of humans to provide a product they say is very accurate and rapidly produced.

The firm went after freelancers; their current and massive base of 5,000 transcribers was built by word-of-mouth and eliminated the need for recruiting costs, says Dunayev. The firm is able to pick and choose among the many transcribers, matching projects with transcribers’ qualifications, backgrounds, and geographical similarities. “We found customers that work with us really choose to because they care about quality. These are people who run conferences and record business meetings. These are people who really care about one hundred percent quality—people like doctors, lawyers and we work a lot of people in the education space,” Dunayev says.

TranscribeMe, noted Small Business Trends, was born out of a need Dunayev and his co-founder had in their lives, an approach that has been around for quite some time (transcription services), and the use of some incredible technology to create a new business model. Dunayev points out that, “It really came out of personal pain-points. There was nothing else that’s out there that could do what we wanted—that could really reach that quality, speed, confidentiality and cost,” so in finding a way to provide that to his wife, and by incorporating a variety of technology solutions, a new business was born.

Sources:

Hessinger, Shawn. Small Business Trends, “Top Small Business News This Week: May 14.”  May 17, 2013.

Leary, Brent. Small Business Trends,”Alexiei Dunayev of TranscribeMe: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” May 17, 2013.